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Canonical & rel=prev / next changes to website a good idea or not?

Technical SEO

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isntworkdull last edited by
Hi all,

I decided yesterday to make a load of changes to my website, and today i woke thinking, should i have done that! So below is an example of what i have done (i will try to explain clearly anyway), can you let me know if you think what i have done would harm or help my website in search results etc...

ok, so lets take just one category - Cameras

And it has the sub categories -
1. box
2. dome
3. bullet
it also has other sub categories (which are actually features, but the only way i can show them on my site is by having them as a sub-category with its own static page, and adding the products to these as secondary categories)
- vandal proof
- high resolution
- night vision
previously i have it set up so that every single category / sub category / feature had its own static page, with a canonical tag to itself (i.e cameras.html canonical was to cameras.html, vandalproof.html canonical was to vandalproof.html). Any of the categories / sub cats / features that had more than one page were simply not in search results due to the canonical pointing to "Page 1"...

What i have now done:

Last night i decided to change all this, now for all categories / sub cats / features i have add rel=prev / next where applicable, and removed the canonical from second / third / fourth pages etc, but left the canonical on "page 1".

I also removed any keywords from page 2,3,4 etc and changed descriptions to just page "X" + category name.

So for example, page one looks like:

and page two looks like:

I also went a little further (maybe too far) and decided that the features pages would canonicalize back to cameras so for those i now have:

Page 1:

Page 2:

Any advice is welcome on the above, in regards to which way may be better and why, and obviously if anything jumps out as a mistake...

Please advise

James
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